Developing a Theologia Crucis : Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the Harlem Renaissance

Abstract

In 1928–29, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an assistant pastor in Barcelona, Spain, where he delivered twenty sermons and three academic lectures. The last two of his Barcelona lectures demonstrate the intellectual acumen of a brilliant scholar, but some of the content of the lectures was not consistent with his legacy of prophetic resistance to the Nazis and their Christian supporters, the German Christian movement. In Barcelona Bonhoeffer spoke in favor of nationalism, which he later opposed. In a brief statement about the 1928–29 Barcelona lectures, Bonhoeffer’s best friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge said, simply “it was the theologia crucis that saved him from this line of thought.” This article argues that during his Sloane Fellowship year, 1930–31, Bonhoeffer was a student of New York’s Harlem Renaissance, where he was put in contact with a tradition that recognized Jesus as active and present in the daily lives of marginalized people, identifying with suffering and shame, as a redemptive presence in oppression. That tradition put Bonhoeffer in contact with his own German Lutheran theological tradition of the theologia crucis, helping him to see racist oppression as it is in this world, a problem that Christians must address, and to advocate solidarity with Jesus, who is hidden in the world, in suffering and shame.

Keywords

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Harlem Renaissance black Christ W.E.B. Du Bois Georgia Douglas Johnson Claude McKay Albert Franklin Fisher

The summer that Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Albert Franklin Fisher matriculated at Union Theological Seminary in New York was the same summer that two young black men, Thomas Shipp, 18, and Adam Smith, 19, were lynched in Marion, Indiana.¹ On August 7, 1930, Shipp and Smith were dragged from the sheriff’s jail by a white horde, brutally tortured and lynched, becoming the last documented lynching in the northern United States.² Photographs of the dead, tortured corpses of Shipp and Smith hanging from two trees and surrounded by a delighted mob of white men, women, and children were publicized nationwide and became the inspiration for Billie Holiday’s haunting song, “Strange Fruit.”³

During that same summer of 1930, Fisher celebrated his graduation from Howard University in Washington D.C. as he followed in the career footsteps of his father, the esteemed scholar and pastor Charles Fisher.⁴ Albert Fisher and his family were accustomed to the perils of navigating a Christian America where white people who professed to love Jesus could snuff out his life, or the lives of his loved ones, with religious zeal and calloused indifference. But the Fishers were also Christians, and as a student at Union, Fisher’s field-study assignment at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem had him attending a church within his own Christian tradition.⁵ Christianity in Harlem was representative of a tradition that saw Jesus identifying with people who are historically oppressed and marginalized, rather than the dominant and powerful who were implicated in practices of tyranny. When Albert Fisher introduced Bonhoeffer to Harlem, Bonhoeffer met a community that was intimately familiar with white racist terrorism, and news of lynchings were commonly shared within the community, whether or not the stories made it into the white news. Bonhoeffer entered New York for the 1930–31 academic year, and exposure to the “strange fruit” of black suffering helped place him in better contact with his own German Lutheran identity by guiding him into new theological insights.

A Modified Christ as Center

The black suffering that was on display in America as Bonhoeffer made his way across the Atlantic was, in part, the product of Christian devotion to a Jesus who was theologically modified to endorse white supremacy. Bonhoeffer was familiar with a similar theological modification in Germany. Years after World War II, Bonhoeffer’s only surviving brother, Karl Friedrich, claimed that the entire Bonhoeffer family perceived the political authority of National Socialism in Germany to be a “misfortune” for the country.⁶ Karl Friedrich’s claim indicates that Dietrich’s negative perspective on the National Socialist German Christians was shared by his whole family and was not contingent upon his time in New York. Bonhoeffer would never have followed the German Christians. Yet, not long before he traveled to New York, Bonhoeffer was an assistant pastor of an expatriate German congregation in Barcelona, Spain, 1928–29, where he delivered two academic lectures that betray sympathies within his developing theology for German nationalism.⁷

Bonhoeffer described Jesus as Stellvertretung, which was a term that represented Jesus as the ethical imperative for Christian social action by naming who Christ is and what Christ expects of his followers.⁸ In Barcelona, Bonhoeffer’s third academic lecture, titled “Basic Questions of a Christian Ethic,” coupled his Christ-centered theology with an emphasis on God’s loyalty to the superior German people, or Volk. Christ endorsed the superiority of the German Volk over all other nations:⁹

Peoples [Voelker] are like individuals . . . they grow into the blossom of youth, mature in adults, and die . . . . growth involves expansion: an increase in strength involves pushing aside other individuals . . . . Now, should a people [Volk] experiencing God's call in its own life, in its own youth, and in its own strength, should not such a people also be allowed to follow that call even if it disregards the lives of others peoples? God is the Lord of history . . . .¹⁰

Hope for Germany’s future in the German post-World War I context of shame and longing included crafting a spirited narrative as a frame on which to connect German nostalgia for the fallen empire with a vision of a brighter German tomorrow. Bonhoeffer knew this narrative framework as well as anyone. Longing for Germany’s glorious past helped frame a Christ-centered Volk-ish narrative of a recovered, victorious people.

The Volk-ish German Christianity included theology shaped by a longing for the triumph of empire rather than what Bonhoeffer would later value, the recognition of suffering. Bonhoeffer’s developed capacity to identify suffering humanity as central to christology was the basis for his later rebuke of the theology of the invisible Volk-ish Christian that he claimed misrepresented the Lutheran theology of the cross.

Theologia Crucis vs. Theologia Gloriae: Murder Could be Justified

The Barcelona lectures reveal a Bonhoeffer who was seduced by German nationalism before his Sloane Fellowship at Union. Although not a lingering presence within his actual legacy, the Jesus modified to endorse nationalism introduced contradictions into Bonhoeffer’s empathic, socially vicarious Stellvertretung christology. Bonhoeffer’s best friend and biographer, Eberhard Bethge, claimed that further developments in his understanding of theologia crucis saved him from the problems evident within his Barcelona Lectures.¹¹

Martin Luther contrasted theologia crucis with theologia gloriae in his Heidelberg Disputation, 1518, to argue that the revelation of God occurs not in the glory of human aptitude for all to see, but in hiddenness, through suffering and shame.¹² The theologian of glory claims to grasp theological theories as full and complete accounts of reality, leaving no room for doubt or debate.¹³ The result of a theology of glory is a far too confident Christian: too confident about facile theological responses to complex questions of life that have not been engaged faithfully, and often shaping Christians whose lives look no different than the rest of society.

As a pastor in Barcelona, Bonhoeffer claimed that Christian efforts to derive ethics from the Bible were the work of theologia gloriae. That claim made room for Christian discipleship to be defined by values retrieved from popular social and political themes rather than what Bonhoeffer later described as biblical concreteness. Accordingly, in Barcelona Bonhoeffer’s latent description of theologia crucis reflected interpretations that valued the hiddenness of discipleship over the hubris of theologia gloriae, described as prideful and arrogant works righteousness:

When people merely listen, merely receive, that is, when they seem to be the farthest from God in irreligion and immorality, then God is closest to them. Religion and morality contain in them a germ of hubris, the essentially Greek concept of hostility toward the divine, the germ of pride, of arrogance.¹⁴

By listening and receiving, rather than acting on biblical commandments, believers can avoid the errors that accompany all religious claims to morality and ethics. Indeed, Christianity does not guide us to behave a particularly “Christian” way as Bonhoeffer claimed: “the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound.”¹⁵ To drive home his point about theologia gloriae, Bonhoeffer insisted that “Christianity and ethics have absolutely nothing to do with each other. There is no Christian ethic. From the idea of Christianity, there is absolutely no transition to the idea of ethics.”¹⁶ Implicit in Bonhoeffer’s argument is the claim that trying to follow the Gospels as though they provided concrete commandments results in theologia gloriae, or religious hubris. But this line of thought stripped Jesus of historical interaction that provides concrete guidance for Christian discipleship. Removing Jesus’ historical context eliminates all resistance to the homogenizing authority of harmful ideology, which helps him fit the German Volk-ish narrative of the modified Jesus.¹⁷

For the sake of the Volk, war could be justified, and murder could be sanctified;¹⁸ the modified Christ demands the maintenance of no laws, except the law of freedom justified by grace.¹⁹ Volk-ish Christianity configured Christian discipleship in Germany by coupling Christ and imperialism, which purged Christianity of any claims to recognize ethnic or national others within the scope of German Christian moral responsibility, especially during war, as, Bonhoeffer claimed:

It would be an utter perversion of one’s ethical sensibilities to believe that my first duty is to love my enemy and precisely in so doing to surrender my neighbor to destruction, in the most concrete sense. It is simply not possible to love or, as the case may be, to protect both my enemy and my people … God gave me my mother, my people. For what I have, I thank my people; what I am, I am through my people, and so what I have should also belong to my people; that is in the divine order [Ordnung] of things, for God created the peoples.²⁰

Nationalist sympathies in Bonhoeffer’s theology prior to New York entangled him in a social Darwinism that he would have to reject after Harlem. When the National Socialists came to power in Germany, the German Christian movement mobilized social Darwinism and Völk-ish Christianity to further racialize the Jews in Germany, much like white supremacists in America blended popular harmful ideology with Christianity to racialize black people. What Bonhoeffer discovered in Harlem helped him to see the Jewish question in Germany as a race problem, and to see the race problem as a Christian problem. This new insight helped to change the trajectory of his Christian self-understanding towards identifying with the oppressed.

An Encounter in Harlem

When he arrived at Union Theological Seminary, Bonhoeffer quickly began looking beyond what the institution, or any one theologian had to offer him, just as he did as a student in Berlin. At the seminary, he was strategic about his classes, and his second-semester courses became tools for positive, structured engagement with what he was gaining from his encounters within the communities where he was spending most of his time. He found himself frustrated with theology at Union and in the many white churches where he visited. In a letter dated December 19, 1930, he penned a scathing assessment of the theological environment at Union and within the white churches he visited, which by that time also included white churches in states outside of New York. Bonhoeffer traveled through southern states on his way to Cuba for Christmas break during his Sloane Fellowship year. On that trip to Cuba he saw further evidence of significant problems with white Christianity in America:

The separation of whites from blacks in the southern states really does make a rather shameful impression. … The way the southerners talk about Negroes is simply repugnant, and in this regard the pastors are no better than the others. … It is a bit unnerving that in a country with so inordinately many slogans about brotherhood, peace, and so on, such things still continue completely uncorrected.²¹

The appalling theological content in white American Christianity, coupled with the Christian performance of white supremacy, proved to deepen the problem of Christianity in America, as Bonhoeffer observed. After four months in America, Bonhoeffer’s letter of December 19 to his Church Superintendent Max Diestel claimed, “there is no theology here.”²²

In that same letter, Bonhoeffer said that in those four months he had “only heard a genuine proclamation of the gospel from a Negro.”²³ The tone of the statement was astonishment; to his amazement, he was “increasingly discovering greater religious power and originality among the Negroes.”²⁴ Yet there were at least two levels of surprise in his discovery of African American Christians. The Gospel that he heard from African Americans in Harlem caught his attention by its familiar theological language of Christ-centeredness. But he came to learn that Christ-centeredness in Harlem meant a different engagement with the world than what he was familiar with as a privileged citizen of a transitioning modern European empire.

Harlem, the Colonial Wound, and the White Christ

It was ironic that Bonhoeffer’s letter criticizing the appalling content of white American theology, and his embrace of the “Negro” rendition of the Gospel, was written from Havana, Cuba, a formerly colonized territory where he was enjoying the privileges of being a European. Bonhoeffer’s Christmas letter from Cuba described the excellent academic status of the theological environment within the German quarter he was visiting. As he continued the letter, it appears that his analysis of American theology did not yet reach the point of identification with the Harlem Renaissance community where he had become an impromptu student.

Healthy identification and empathy in Harlem meant that Bonhoeffer was able to learn from suffering that was unfamiliar to him, rather than only seeing in others the experiences that made up his formative history. Bonhoeffer entered Harlem and turned it into an extension of the classroom during his academic experience in America. This is important, for if Bonhoeffer had only seen himself reflected back to him in Harlem and in Cuba, the results of his learning in those spaces would reveal the precarious nature of the practice of empathy, and his assessment of American Christianity to Diestel that “there is no theology here” would be the result of unreliable evaluation.²⁵ Bonhoeffer did not address what Walter Mignolo describes as Cuba’s colonial wound because he does not have a framework for the Cuban experience.²⁶ Consequently, his empathy for the Cuban poor may not be a view from the perspective of the subjugated, but rather from the perspective of an imperialist, an assessment of the status of the German presence in Cuba. As a member of a modern European empire, empathy in Cuba meant that he had to make a connection between the suffering in Cuba and white European imperialism.²⁷

Bonhoeffer’s goals for his time in America resulted in his learning from others of the connection between racialized humanity and racialized Christianity, with its white and black Christs.²⁸ The white Christ was not only present in Harlem; the white Christ was present within the colonial wound that remained in Cuba, and in all other locations where an imperialist mindset lingered, or left a mark. The Harlem Renaissance community saw itself as linked to the colonized Cuban people, in a global experience of the dominating color line and the accompanying imperialist, white racist power structure within which Bonhoeffer could choose to remain safe.

Yet I believe Bonhoeffer’s remarks to Diestel are evidence that he did see something in Cuba, something that reminded him of his early impressions of Harlem. Cuba represented evidence of healthy empathic learning that marked the nascent stages of Bonhoeffer’s identification with outcasts, and his emergence from the lingering influence of the narcissistic white Christ of postcolonial German nationalism.²⁹

The white Christ was the theological muscle within the power structure of the color line and its global manifestations: colonization, imperialism, and nationalism abroad, and white racist terrorism in America. The grip of white supremacy’s power structure was constructed for white men like Bonhoeffer to be comfortable in their hands. But his interpretation of Christ as Stellvertretung opened him to an empathic theological experience that took Bonhoeffer into the context of oppressed people where he learned of his own disturbing theological commitments from the perspective of others, in a critical engagement with the lethal white Christ. To his credit, Bonhoeffer’s empathic move included the capacity to make revisions in his theology and worldview after diagnosing a problem.

Theology in the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance turned New York into a theo-political space for an emerging global discourse on race, religion, and politics. Reinhold Niebuhr featured authors from Harlem’s literary movement in a spring semester course that Bonhoeffer took from him titled “Ethical Viewpoints in Modern Literature.” “In a lecture course by Niebuhr, the social and Christian problem was discussed in the context of modern American literature. That was extremely informative. I learned much from my own experiences in Harlem.”³⁰ The analysis of religion and black suffering by Harlem Renaissance intellectuals highlights the familiar theme of God’s hiddenness in suffering and shame that was key to Bonhoeffer’s continued theological development.

In 1920, W.E. B. Du Bois published Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil as a sequel to his groundbreaking Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. Darkwater began with a “Postscript” instead of an introduction. In the “Postscript” he claimed, “I have been in the world, but not of it,”³¹ a clear reference to Jesus’ words in John 15:19. Some Christians understood Jesus’ words to his disciples that they were “not of the world” to mean that his followers should disengage from broader society, but Du Bois borrows Jesus’ words to give a theological basis for his observation of white Christian society and politics:³²

I have seen the human drama from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have reproduced themselves in microcosm from within. From this inner torment of souls, the human scene without has interpreted itself to me in unusual and even illuminating ways.³³

The veiled corner is hidden to the white majority. It is the vantage point to which Bonhoeffer was referring when he described the African American community as “a rather hidden perspective.”³⁴ From the hidden perspective it is apparent that racism prohibits authentic Christian discipleship. Du Bois identified Jesus with the oppressed, as a symbol of God’s work for liberation and justice. To disclose this hidden Jesus, Du Bois favored Jesus’ emphasis on peace in the Sermon on the Mount:

There comes a priest of the meek and lowly

Jesus—a Servant of the Servant who said

Blessed are the Meek,

Blessed are the Poor,

Blessed are the Merciful,

Blessed are the Peace-makers,

Blessed are the Persecuted.³⁵

Du Bois’s use of the Sermon on the Mount was a rebuke to authorities who saw no incongruity between race hatred and Christianity. For Du Bois, the Sermon was evidence that Jesus offers opposition, not compliance, to the vicious, dominating nature of the color line.

Other Harlem Renaissance authors followed Du Bois’s lead with their depictions of Jesus among the oppressed. In 1922, Jamaican author Claude McKay’s “The Lynching” painted a gruesome picture of a lynching to connect Jesus’ suffering with the suffering of persecuted black people. McKay’s poem portrayed Jesus as an innocent child of God whom God called back to Heaven:

His spirit is smoke, ascended to the high heaven.

His father, by the cruelest way of pain,

Had bidden him to his bosom once again.

The awful sin remained still unforgiven.

All night a bright and solitary star

(Perchance the one that ever guided him,

Yet gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim)

Hugh pitifully o’er the swinging char.

Day dawned, and soon the mixed crowds came to view

The ghastly body swaying in the sun.

The women thronged to look, but never a one

Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;

And little lads, lynchers that were to be,

Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.³⁶

The detail of McKay’s depiction recovers the horror of the ghastly public act that was robbed of its shock, and turned into a pornography of black suffering. An appropriate human response to the lynched, smoldering, dead black body hanging in public view does not come from the white onlookers. Children should be terrified rather than gleeful, and the spectacle should generate some compassion for the obvious cruelty it illustrates.³⁷ But the modified Jesus is the carrier for a virus that blinds its host and turns a faith born in love and compassion into rabid domination and cruelty.

In 1923, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s “Christmas Greetings” described faith in Christ as dissonant within the African American experience. The poem illustrates the uneasy connection of hope, struggle, and generosity in a black reception of Christ:

Come brothers, lift on high your voice,

The Christ is born, let us rejoice!

And for all mankind let us pray,

Forgetting wrongs upon this day.

He was despised, and so are we,

Like Him we go to Calvary;

He leads us by his bleeding hand,

Through ways we do not understand.

Come brothers, lift on high your voice,

The Christ is born, let us rejoice!

Shall we not to the whole world say—

God bless you! It is Christmas Day!³⁸

Johnson’s Christmas poem speaks of a connection to Christ, not in power, or in a full, final accounting of God’s will; the poem speaks of a black connection to Christ in suffering. Connecting with Christ in suffering allows for full honesty about the absurdity of suffering, the limits of human understanding, and the hiddenness of God.³⁹

The theme of God’s hiddenness in suffering was also present in the only poem that Bonhoeffer mentioned by name.⁴⁰ Countee Cullen’s “The Black Christ” was a Harlem Renaissance poem that Bonhoeffer mentioned eight years after his Sloane Fellowship, when commenting on the racial condition of American Christianity in his 1939 essay “Protestantism without Reformation”:

For American Christendom the racial issue has been a real problem from the beginning … The young, forward-looking generation of Negroes are turning away from the faith of their elders because they view its strong eschatological orientation as an obstacle to the progress of their race and rights. … The fact that today the “black Christ” of a young Negro poet is pitted against the “white Christ” reveals a destructive rift [Zerstörung] within the church of Jesus Christ … today the general picture of the church in the United States is still one of racial fragmentation.⁴¹

The “strong eschatological orientation” was the opiate features of religion that Bonhoeffer discovered were problematic for younger African Americans. Cullen’s “The Black Christ” artistically illustrates this problem. The poem places Jesus empathically into the shoes of a young handsome and intelligent black man in the south who is lynched at home in front of his mother and elder brother. The lynched man’s mother is Christian, who like Mary the mother of Jesus is present and praying to God as her son’s murder is carried out.

But the elder brother is vexed by the terrorism that white people inflict on blacks. The elder brother in Cullen’s poem represents the discomfort with Christianity present for some in the generation of African Americans whose life experiences were in the north, and who were mostly unaware of the terror that life in the southern states inflicted upon their parents and grandparents. The younger Harlem Renaissance generation of African Americans perceived Christianity as a white racist religion and an opiate that served their elders as mollified prey to rabid white racists. Bonhoeffer observed this reaction against Christianity and claimed that “among the youth, who see how Christian preaching made their fathers so meek in the face of their incomparably harsh fate, an element of opposition against such forms of religion is emerging, that is, against Christianity.”⁴² Cullen’s poem taps into this black disdain for opiate Christianity in the elder brother’s rage against his mother as she prayed while her youngest son was lynched:

“Call on him now,” I mocked, “and try

Your faith against His deed, while I

With intent equally as sane,

Searching a motive for this pain,

Will hold a little stone on high

And seek of it a reason why.

Which, stone or God, will first reply …?

What has He done for you who spent

A bleeding life for His content?

Or is white Christ, too, distraught

By these dark skins His Father wrought?”⁴³

The elder brother sees Christ as inspiration for the behavior of racist whites. But he soon learns that his mother is not the one sedated by the opiate Christ, nor is his mother’s Christ white. The white Christ is indeed an opiate, but he is an opiate to mollify and placate racist Christians, not their victims. The black mother knows that the real Christ is hidden from racists in and amongst the victims of white cruelty, with those whom Bonhoeffer in a sermon shortly after returning from Harlem would describe as the poor and the outcast who are consoled by God.⁴⁴ Indeed even her eldest son did not recognize the presence of Christ until he came to see him in his brother’s suffering. Only at the recognition of Christ’s presence in his brother’s suffering did the elder brother come to know Christ, and to proclaim him as the “form immaculately born, betrayed a thousand times each morn, as many times each night denied, surrendered, tortured, crucified!”⁴⁵

This theological analysis of race by intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance did not go unnoticed by Bonhoeffer. He encountered these works while studying with Niebuhr, and through his own intensive study of the movement. Eberhard Bethge indicated that Bonhoeffer collected publications of the NAACP, and read a great deal of African American literature published in other volumes as well. The volumes of African American literature that Bethge was referring to were likely the NAACP’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity. Both magazines were major clearinghouses for Harlem’s literary movement, and by paying close attention to them Bonhoeffer was exposed to the notable currents within the movement. But Bonhoeffer did more than read them. Bonhoeffer wrote an essay on Harlem Renaissance literature during his Sloane Fellowship, which is lost to us but further indicates the sincerity of his engagement with their work.⁴⁶

A Developed Theologia Crucis

After New York, Bonhoeffer spoke differently about theologia crucis as a recognition of God’s hiddenness in suffering with the outcast and the marginalized, as he had experienced God in the “hidden” African American communities. What is more, the prior misinterpretation of theologia crucis as social conformity is now criticized. Bonhoeffer was explicit about his developed interpretation of theologia crucis in Discipleship:

It may be also—and that is even more dangerous—a so-called reformation theology, which even dares to call itself theologia crucis and whose signature is that it prefers a “humble” invisibility in the form of total conformity to the world over a “Pharisaic” visibility [theologia gloriae] …?⁴⁷

Christ’s identification with suffering becomes the “hiddenness” of God’s glory, and among the marginalized we experience the presence and power of God to redeem. In this context, we find concrete ethical guidance from Christ:

The good works of the disciples should be seen in this light. … What are these good works which can be seen in this light? They can be no other works than those Jesus himself created in the disciples when he called them, when he made them the light of the world under his cross—poverty, being strangers, meekness, peace-making, and finally being persecuted and rejected, and in all of them one work: bearing the cross of Jesus Christ.⁴⁸

Bonhoeffer continued in Discipleship to describe the reconciliation of God and creation in the person of Christ with the way of Jesus described as concrete guiding substance from the Sermon on the Mount for daily living. From the interpretation of theologia crucis in Discipleship we find that Jesus is hidden in suffering, not in “cheap grace,” and that one cannot have fellowship with God in disobedience, or while marginalizing the oppressed.

“Blessed Are You Lazaruses”

For Bonhoeffer, the call that Harlem placed on his Christian identity inspired him to see that discipleship to the Christ hidden in suffering and shame includes more than solidarity in suffering; Christian discipleship involves concrete action on behalf of the oppressed. In 1932 Bonhoeffer was an ordained chaplain at the Technical College in Charlottenburg, Berlin. It was not quite a full year after he returned from Harlem, on May 29, when Bonhoeffer preached a sermon from Luke 16: 19–31 about the rich man and Lazarus and the need for Christian attention to suffering. The good news of the Gospel, for Bonhoeffer, is more than a moral to live by; the good news is the present location, and work of God in the world. It is the announcement of God’s love:

That was the good news. … That was the love of God itself, which spoke in his way to the poor and suffering. You outcasts, you disadvantaged … you who are looked down upon … Blessed are you Lazaruses of all ages, you broken down and ruined, you lonely and abandoned, rape victims and those who suffer injustice, you who suffer in body and soul; blessed are you for God’s joy will come over you and be over [your] head forever. That is the gospel, the good news …⁴⁹

The good news of the Gospel is distorted by theology that teaches Christians to ignore the daily conditions of human existence. When we do ignore concrete day-to-day interaction, we “sublimate” the Gospel, moralize it, and spiritualize it.⁵⁰ But here is the heart of this sermon from Bonhoeffer: first, by spiritualizing the concrete Gospel, we change it into triumphant ideology with prefigured answers for suffering that allows Christians to “disdain the mass of Lazaruses.”⁵¹ The Gospel as a guide for living becomes something different than concrete good news for the poor; it is no longer about them, it is co-opted by deviant ideologies and becomes poison for the marginalized and an endorsement of the life of the dominant.

Second, a triumphant Gospel becomes a mockery to placate those in suffering and misery with overemphasized eschatological hopes. A spiritualized Gospel is what Bonhoeffer read as the opiate religion of white racism that made African Americans meek in face of white cruelty.⁵² Opiate Christianity was a distortion of the Gospel that young blacks resisted. It was a mockery of suffering and a theological justification for oppressed blacks to accept their fate:

Doesn’t it almost sound as if one is just trying to keep these unfortunates from rebelling here against their fate? As if one is calling them blessed just so they will stay quiet, as they are now, and not bother the others? Oh, countless times it has happened that way—who wouldn’t deny it … And millions have become estranged from the gospel for this reason!⁵³

The pious platitudes that turn the Gospel into an opiate to endorse suffering distort Christianity by not taking suffering seriously, as Jesus did. “Jesus called the poor blessed,” Bonhoeffer says, “but he healed them, too.” Jesus took suffering seriously, addressing the physical needs of suffering people. On earth, now Jesus

takes suffering so seriously that in a moment he must destroy it. Where Christ is, the power of the demons must be broken. That is why he heals, and that is why he says to his disciples: If you believe in me, you will do greater works than I.⁵⁴

Bonhoeffer did not advocate that disciples perform miracles of healing, but that they recognize Christ hidden in suffering as the concrete nature of the Gospel’s good news. The concreteness of the work of God in Christ demands that we see our suffering brothers and sisters, the full measure of their misery, and behind them, Christ, who invites them to table and calls them blessed. Seeing and doing the Gospel in this way is being a Christian in accordance with the good news of a loving God hidden in suffering.

Footnotes

1

In conversations I have had with family members who knew Bonhoeffer’s African American friend well, particularly his daughters Dr. Valerie Fisher and Dr. Minnie Rose Richardson, the common reference to Fisher as “Frank” was corrected. His friends and family only knew him by his first name, Albert, or Al. In their honor, I refer to him in this article as Albert. See Reggie Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic Of Resistance (Waco: Baylor University, forthcoming).

2

See James Cameron, A Time of Terror (Milwaukee, WI: TD, 1982), 49–63.

3

James H. Madison, A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America, 1st edn (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 113.

4

See Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus.

5

Ruth Zerner, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s American Experiences: People, Letters, and Papers from Union Seminary,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 31:4 (1976): 268.

6

See Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. edn, ed. Victoria Barnett (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 258.

7

See Heinz Eduard Tödt, Ernst-Albert Scharffenorth, and Glen Harold Stassen, Authentic Faith: Bonhoeffer’s Theological Ethics in Context, English edn (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 77–82.

8

Glen Harold Stassen, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 152–53.

9

See n. 34 in DBWE 10, 373.

10

DBWE 10, 373, see n. 34.

11

Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, rev. edn (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000), 120.

12

Gerhard O. Forde and Martin Luther, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 72ff.

13

Douglas John Hall, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), 16ff.

14

DBWE 10, 353.

15

DBWE 10, 354.

16

Ibid., 365.

17

See Stassen, A Thicker Jesus, 3.

18

DBWE 10, 362.

19

See Tödt, Scharffenorth, and Stassen, Authentic Faith, 80.

20

DBWE 10, 370--1.

21

Ibid., 269.

22

Ibid., 265.

23

Ibid.

24

Ibid., 266.

25

Saidiya V. Hartman, “Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Oxford University Press On-line (New York: Oxford University, 1999), .

26

Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America, Blackwell Manifestos (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 8.

27

See Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus.

28

DBWE 10, 315.

29

Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Texts and Contexts) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2005), 135ff.

30

Ibid., 318, 420.

31

W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, Dover Thrift Editions (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), ix.

32

Edward J. Blum, W.E.B. Du Bois: American Prophet, Politics and Culture in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007), 27.

33

Du Bois, Darkwater, ix.

34

DBWE 10, 314.

35

See W.E.B Du Bois, “Satterlee,” Horizon 1 (June 1907): 4–5.

36

Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude Mckay (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922), 51.

37

Williams, Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus.

38

See The Opportunity Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the Urban League’s Opportunity Magazine (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 42.

39

See Hall, The Cross in Our Context, 17ff., and Dorothee Sölle, Suffering (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 30ff.

40

On this theme, see my essays “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Christ,” in K.L. Johnson and T. Larsen eds., Bonhoeffer, Christ and Culture (Downers Grove, IN: IVP Academic, 2013), 59–72, and “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Christ,” in C.J. Green and G.C. Carter eds., Interpreting Bonhoeffer: Historical Perspectives, Emerging Issues (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013), 155--68.

41

DBWE 15, 456–57. See editors’ n. 48: “The Black Christ and Other Poems is the title of a collection of poetry by the black poet Countee Cullen (cf. DBWE 10, 315, note 31. [See also Bonhoeffer’s reading notes on “Negro Literature,” DBWE 10, 421–22, and the editor’s introduction to DBWE 10, 30–31—VB].”

42

DBWE 10, 315.

43

Countee Cullen, The Black Christ & Other Poems, 1st edn (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1929), 103, 105.

44

See Bonhoeffer’s Sermon on 16:19–31. DBWE 11, 443ff.

45

Cullen, The Black Christ, 108

46

DBWE 11, 95.

47

DBWE 4, 115–16.

48

Ibid., 114.

49

DBWE 11, 446, 447.

50

Ibid., 445.

51

Ibid., 446.

52

DBWE 10, 315.

53

DBWE 11, 447.

54

Ibid.

Author biography

Reggie Williams is Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics at McCormick Theological Seminary. His research interests are primarily focused on christological hermeneutics and Christian morality. His current projects include an analysis of the developments within Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology and ethics as a result of his experience in the Harlem Renaissance, 1930–1931.